GSoC Day 66

The Reverse debugging button

• The reverse debugging button works! It can save a few frames and walk backwards to the last few frames in 1/60 of a second increments. There is a merge conflict on the branch that needs to be squashed, but it should be merged into master pretty soon.

Also

• Chris and Gabe introduced me to MagicHash in GHC. I have some reading up on it to do, but apparently I also need to enable GHC.Prim to use it. In this particular case, I was using an unhashed Integer.

Last night

• I was reading this book (warning: this is a pdf link!). There are some interesting solutions for things, like the sieve of Eratosthenes. I have no idea how I found it. I might have been looking up something on Typeclasses. I think I understand it a lot better now. I skipped ahead to functional patterns today in Hbook, since that’s closer to where I really am in the book (I just went back to Typeclasses to try to nail it down). I’m slower at learning this stuff because I’m used to taking forever on something until I get it. But I’ll keep coming back to it until I get it. I’m almost there for understanding Typeclasses, but still think I need to spend more time on it. That and type-tetris (getting better at it), particularly for function applications. I spent an obscene amount of time at work today on Haskell. I was getting work done, but also watching Conor McBride videos and then some on Recursive Polymorphism and then stopped completely and tried to do Haskell. Haskell happens, I guess?
• I sort of feel like even though it’s kicking my @$$ right now, I need to do Haskell. Some of the other interns are probably confused, and I really don’t know why either, but I keep needing to do Haskell :(

Unit

• I learned a bit more about “unit”, which is seen typically in IO ().
• I also stumbled across “pickler combinators” and “idiom brackets” along the way, randomly. Right now, I’m trying to get better at changing one type of syntax to another (eg anonymous functions to where clauses and stuff like that). So basically different ways of changing the shape of code without changing the meaning.
• Oh, I also ran into George Wilson’s awesome video on Typeclasses.

That seems about it for today

• I got a fair amount of work done at my local internship today, and then spent the bulk of time on Haskell. Haskell is important to me, and I’ve already spoken to people who have sort of “settled” and “don’t have time to code” anymore there. That scares me. A lot. Some of them just graduated, too, or at most a year ago. I will always always always find time to code, even when I get it and become fluent in the language. When I become fluent, I also want to just continue contributing to open source and other things in a meaningful way on my own. So that’s the goal. And even after I do that, I’m sure there will be a lot of things I won’t understand. At least that’s how I feel about Haskell.
• A guy at work (in a different department) started talking to me and I mentioned Coq and all that, and he asked me what I thought about JS and Go. My honest answer is “I don’t”. LOL. Maybe I hang around the wrong circles or something, but a lot of my friends are into Rust, Racket, Lisp, Clojure, Haskell, PureScript, Idris, Agda, Coq, Type Theory, Elm, Scala, ATS or Eta; I haven’t anything much about Go or JS. So yeah…I don’t think about those things a lot at all. I know I think about types and languages and compilers a lot, and have an inclination to put parentheses around Haskell code that doesn’t need it. That’s about all I can say on that.

And that’s about it.